Rating: 
Summary: Hated It!
Review: I kept waiting for the plot to take off and go somewhere. I could not make myself like the protagonist or anything about the book
Rating: 
Summary: I didn't think I liked the book...that was 4 weeks ago.
Review: As I read the book, I found myself waiting for something to happen--exciting, disturbing, it didn't matter, I just wanted to feel like the story was going somewhere. It never did. I finished the book feeling disappointed. However, I find I'm still thinking about the story...perhaps it did go somewhere afterall
Rating: 
Summary: I can't wait to read more from Ms. Hamilton
Review: A Map of the World, I believe, was Ms. Hamilton's second book, and it was out and visible at bookstores. After reading it, and loving it, I discovered her first book, The Book of Ruth. I read it and loved it also. I was surprised to all of the sudden see it out and visible. I will read everything Ms. Hamilton writes. Yes, she is a dark one, but stirs emotions like crazy. I think the reason for the delay in publicity for "Ruth" is that somehow A Map of the World got more publicity, and after people read it, they looked for other books by Ms. Hamilton. I hope she's busy writing right now
Rating: 
Summary: The Book of Ruth: Understanding too much.
Review: The Book of Ruth is a study in the kind of life nobody wants to live. It's a lesson in the dangers of empathy and the seductiveness of the familiar. Why don't people, parti
cularly women, leave lives that abuse them? Because some
times the very dysfunctional family has tiny elements of the
very functional. And, tiny though they may be, they become huge in their relativity.
Ruth thinks she is retarded. Her mother said so. She is without a sense of her self except as a character in the lives of those around her. She doesn't even get to be called by her name until late in the book when she is ob
jectively discussed by others. Her only route to actuali
zation, to existence, is through her relationships. Ruth's not retarded. On the contrary. She knows too much.
Feels too much. And her empathy leads her to allowing a lattitude for insanity in others that nearly kills her.
Her mother, May, destroys Ruth emotionally and intellec
tually. Yet the feeling reader has to respond to the pathos
of May's own sorry history. Ruth's husband Ruby has rotten
teeth and smells, but he has one great redemption. He loves
her. He can be anything, just short of murderer, but if he
loves her it is enough. He is horrible, but he is wonder-
ful in his love. And it's not his fault. Because some things really could "make you want to stab, and stab, and stab." Ruth feels responsibility for everyone, but makes
no one take responsibility for themselves. She works over-
time to maintain her own sanity, yet allows insanity in others because they came by it honestly. She asks for so very little. She gets virtually nothing. That's what she's
learned to expect. We can hold her responsible and disdain
her. Or recognize that her foolishness is borne of her
vision: She can look back and understand far too well. The
present is too gripping, the future to unpromising, to put her focus on either of those. But a painful past she under
stands. Poor Ruth. She is the saddest of literary charac
ters...And she comes by it honestly.
Rating:
Summary: foreboding feeling
Review: As I read this book, I always had foreboding feelings. Something wasn't right. You know the other shoe is going to fall. Even in the happy times, Ruth's skill as bowler, her marriage, her happier relationship with her mother; you know it want last
Rating: 
Summary: Too sad for me
Review: I really liked the style of writing but the story was way too depressing for me.
Rating:
Summary: frighteningly familiar contents
Review: The characters of the book reveal the answers to many questions we have when familial tragedies occur. The obvious and hidden tensions that exist in families are the cornerstone of this plot and the ending becomes ever more clear as the characters develop and grow. Parts of the book force reflection and reveal bits of sadness that touch the reader who may have frineds and/or family who fit the characters. This book was a joy and a trouble at the same time. armena andrania
Rating:
Summary: The Book of Ruth by: Jane Hamilton
Review: This was an excellent novel of the dark side to each one
of us. The food and bird imagery is not to be ignored. This is a must read for the person who loves an all American novel.
Rating:
Summary: Superlative first novel about an explosive family situation.
Review: In the Old Testament, the Book of Ruth tells the story of Ruth's loyalty to her widowed mother-in-law, Naomi, after the death of Ruth's husband. In this extraordinary first novel by Jane Hamilton, after May's son leaves home for college, her daughter Ruth stays on, in spite of a miserable childhood in which May relentlessly belittled her daughter and worshipped her son. Ruth, as faithful and dutiful as her Biblical namesake, nearly crushed by her mother's simmering rage, learns to hide her magnificent love of life, so that only the reader and the very few people who care for her know of her poignant insights, hilarious perspective, and tenacious spirit. After a brief period of relative peace between mother and daughter, Ruth falls in love and marries another wounded soul, Ruby, and the three create a home together where trouble is just waiting to happen. What a magnificent writer! Hamilton won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award, given for best first novel, for The Book of Ruth, in 1989. This is a grim and funny story, and an excellent choice for book clubs
Rating:
Summary: A writer on par with Joyce Carol Oates
Review: I have read both this book and Map of the World (which I loved and lived in and wanted to return to when I was finished). "Ruth" is, in my opinion, even more breathtaking than "Map". Hamilton has a fine gift not only of fleshing out a character.. but of fleshing out a relationship in all its subtelties and meaning. Her narrative is as intricate and unpredictable as life itself. Hamilton's writing is so fluid and emotionally tactile it not only brings the reader into the story but lets you inside the characters and their relationships... you will live in Ruth's head and heart, you will truly know what it is to be her... the reader is not left wondering at her motives or reactions. The narrative is so finely woven you find yourself understanding completely the most questionable of characters. It is Hamilton's keen understanding of human nature and the dynamics of human interaction which makes these characters shine with their own particular beauty and intelligence and at the same time with the dark horror of their "mean" "kernel"s. Hamilton's writing is not "meandering" or "boring" at all... there is no line that could have been left out of "Ruth". The story is actually quite spare and we hear all and only what we really need to know. I also do not understand how some readers can give "Ruth" bad reviews simply because it is 'depressing' and 'uninspiring'... Ruth is a victim of circumstances... but we know from living through her all the intricacies of the circumstances and thus how things could have been made better. The story starts with Ruth's feeling that her life's story started with the "meanness" in people... that we all have a kernel of meanness... we see how the subtleties of familial interactions can form the shape of their relationships and people's hearts and ultimately lead to destruction or salvation... the feeding of the kernel of "meanness" or it's eradication through patterns of expected behavior or by deviating from who your world has told you you are. We see how we can change our lives by breaking out of the behavior patterns we follow through the confines of the way our intimates (for better or worse) have drawn us. The only character brave enough to finally leap out of her casted role is Daisy, Ruth's "slutty" friend. Ruth's mother May, tragically, does not have the courage to end the cycle of her expected behavior and neither did Ruth.... but we are left at the end with the possibility of real change for Ruth... by virtue of her having learned how she got to be who and where she is... a revelation we should all be so lucky to make. I found "Ruth" wholly satisfying and also inspiring. This is definitely a book and a character I will carry with me for life and I eagerly await another novel from Hamilton.
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